Right & Left: Big Enough to Apologize

One of the things today is about is saluting people who do the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is done reflexively - other times, only reflectively. Today we focus on 2 bloggers who gave matters some deep thought, concluded they had gone astray, and apologized: one from the Left, and one from the Right.

• Left: Burningbird's "Caricatures and Shadows" looks at her own archives, and has a moment of satori:

"Being passionate about causes, yes; more now than ever. Being passionate about truth, yes; the truth is threatened daily. But fighting with other webloggers -- the nit nitting, the pick, picking -- it's getting old. It gets older, with each level of dust layered on the history of this weblog.... I'm not the person in my words, in these pages that stretch back like too long a road. They are a caricature of me, and I am only a faint shadow in them."

• Right: Following yesterday's blog post here and some back-channel email conversations, Emperor Misha I stepped up. In a typically profane and pugilistic post he nonetheless offers a sincere and unqualified apology, and withdraws his earlier remarks. As Misha himself notes:

"But that's why I'm the Emperor and not "Pope Misha I", I get to screw the pooch from time to time."

Heh. And a big amen, too. It's hard to criticize our own in public. Harder still to criticize ourselves there. These 2 posts come from ideologies and writing styles that could hardly be more different... but the impulse at their core is the same, and worth celebrating.